by Anny Scoones
“For the better?” I asked Norman.
“Not sure,” he said, as we continued on our stroll.
Our next stop on Norman’s informative and lovely scenic tour was Mystic Vale—what a beautiful name. It conjures a magical wood full of fairies and nymphs and delicate flowers and butterflies, all dancing in a pale blue mist. Mystic Vale is in fact a huge forested ravine owned by the University of Victoria, full of walking trails along a little creek, and in autumn covered in thick maple leaves, with afternoon shafts of sunlight jutting between the bare trees onto the forest floor. These warm golden streaks remind me of the annunciation scenes painted through the ages; the annunciation, March 25 (my birthday), is when the angel Gabriel floated from heaven within a radiant glow to inform Mary that she was pregnant. Whether we are religious or not, I think we all appreciate the glory and beauty that the sun brings, especially through the forest.
You can look at a natural setting as a place to walk or an ecosystem, perhaps in need of restoration, or both. Even though these lovely woods are owned by the university, many caring and knowledgeable local residents care for Mystic Vale. They can’t help it—“We love our trees,” said one of my guides, Elizabeth.
Local Mushrooms
Mushroom gathering is perhaps one of the oldest forms of outdoor recreation and food harvesting, and it’s a great surprise to find an edible wild mushroom hiding in the grass or under fallen pine needles. BUT, you need to know which mushrooms are edible, of course! Mushroom gatherers guard their special spots with a vengeance. A good mushroom is a true delicacy.
Mushrooms can be found in the cool autumn after the summer heat fades and the cold, damp nights descend through the mists and onto the meadows and into the forests. Mushrooms love organic matter, either in the fields where perhaps livestock dung has been deposited, or in the woods, particularly under trees where there is a decay of leaves, branches, and even dead animals. Mushrooms in the forest are one of nature’s most wonderful partnerships because the mushrooms help break down organic matter, thus enhancing the woodland soil for other plants.
There are many types of mushrooms with odd names such as the mouse pee pink gill and the stinkhorn, which emits a foul odour resembling rotting flesh. It attracts animals, which will eat it and then spread its spores through their feces—trust Mother Nature to come up with such an original way to spread herself around! It’s one of her jobs.
Here are three common, delicious wild mushrooms that grow in the Victoria region (ask a mushroom expert before you eat a wild mushroom, just to be sure!). The meadow mushroom is very common. It is white, with pink gills, and is found in open meadows and grasslands, lawns and boulevards. It is especially tender and delicious when it first pushes through the earth and is a little button shape. The shaggy mane also sprouts up from fertile grassy areas and is also white but tall and slender with a nice oval cap that looks shaggy, as if it has strings trailing from its top. The shaggy mane ages quickly and turns into a black liquid—some people call it the inky cap. I think the sexiest of all the wild mushrooms is the boletus, a thick, stout mushroom with a slimy, amber skin and a deep yellow spongy underside—you can’t miss the spongy part. Boletus prefers to be under or near the woods, especially conifers. When cooked, the texture is much like tofu, sort of rubbery. BE CAREFUL—there are many types of this voluptuous mushroom and they are all good, except one.
Of course there are the little puffballs as well, which are fun to fry but rather tasteless. The white-spotted red toadstool, which we all have seen in children’s books, is the fly agaric (agaric meaning mushroom) and is usually found in birch or pine forests. It is poisonous! Folklore has it that the red cap was placed in a saucer of milk and used to repel flies.
If mushrooming in our region appeals to you, consult an expert or obtain a mushroom book, and contact the South Vancouver Island Mycological Society for lots of information, courses, and events.
Truffles
Truffles are delicious, rare mushrooms that grow underground among the roots of willows, oaks, elms, chestnuts, and pines. Yes, they can be found on Vancouver Island, in the Douglas-fir forests, but the superior truffles are found in France and Italy. Female pigs were used historically to snuff out truffles. They were attracted to the musty smell of the underground morsel because it resembled the odour of a boar. Dogs are used now because the sows found the truffles to be a lovely snack.
I just cannot let this subject of the sexual sows go without a slight interjection. Having kept four dear, affectionate and loving, sweet-smelling sows at one time, as well as their beautiful and kind (albeit grizzled, hairy, slobbery, yellow-tusked) husband named Boris, I need to reflect for a moment on the odour of a boar, and therefore a truffle. I have never smelled a truffle, but Boris the boar had a ranky, musty odour combined with sort of a sweetness, perhaps from the alfalfa I fed him—his breath was clean, like fresh leaves. So, frankly, it’s a compliment to our close relation, the pig, to favour a delicacy that smells like a boar. In a moment of reflection on why we value so highly a food that smells like a male pig’s privates, I wondered what food could compare to a perspiring man’s odour? And I think I have the answer—cashew butter!
Woodland Birds
As I grow older, I love birds more and more. I love their modesty, their work ethic, their creativity, their strength, and their wisdom. Cadboro Bay, being so forested and treed with its many parks, foreshore green spaces, and trails, is home to many birds. Here are three of my favourites.
Wrens: The wren is both hard-working and creative. There are several species but the one that you might see in the woods is the Pacific wren. This is a very inventive bird because it seeks out interesting places to nest and to make a home. You might find that your woodpile or rusted, abandoned rototiller has been converted into a nesting spot; the nest looks like a cup of sticks lined with leaves or soft feathers. A distinguishing feature of the wren is that it holds its tail upright.
The Pacific wren has a cousin, the winter wren, that lives near our many watercourses. The male winter wren will weave and build numerous nests from reeds and grasses to impress his wife. Should he be lucky enough to be accepted by her, the wedding will take place and she will select which abode she prefers. Each nest is constructed in a ball shape with a little hole for entering and exiting, well hidden in marsh or lakeshore grasses. Now how many husbands will do that for a potential mate and risk being rejected?
Great Horned Owl: The private, quiet, and patient one. The great horned owl is distinguished by his handsome, large ear tufts. He sits in the trees and is active mostly in the evening. Sometimes in the night you can hear his “Whoo-hoo-oo,” which for me seems very comforting, knowing that there is a presence deep in the trees when the rest of world is asleep. The great horned owl is a recycler, nesting in older, used nests in the trees constructed by other birds such as crows.
Owls perch very quietly on a limb, perhaps dozing or perhaps waiting to pounce on a morsel, but it is this focused stillness that has given them the image of wisdom; to be rash and impulsive may not be unwise, but to exhibit the owls’ stoic dignity is admirable—I’d love to have their patience!
Swallows: Swallows are wonderfully busy little birds that eat a lot of insects by snatching them in their rapid, swooping, erratic flight. Swallows are very useful because many of the insects they consume, such as mosquitoes, are annoying to us.
The largest local swallow in North America is the purple martin. There is a dedicated birding group that is concerned about the purple martins’ decline and has embarked on a large-scale plan to set up nesting boxes in many locations to help increase their population and bring them home. Many of these locations are near the water, where insects are abundant.
On the Saanich Peninsula you can find the barn swallow with his chestnut throat and belly. The barn swallow builds nests of mud (and good peninsula clay!) on rafters inside barns and farm buildings. They pick up hair, wool, and feathers from the livestock below. But it is the viole
t-green swallow you will see in the woodlands and parks. In sunlight, the green shimmers like emeralds; the violet colour is on his backside. They make nests in tree cavities but will welcome a home inside a nesting box as well.
A word about nesting boxes—a friend of mine cleaned out her box when the babies had fledged and found the nest had a lining skilfully constructed of cigarette butts! I’m not sure what to think about this—it’s an image I cannot get out of my head. It’s sad in a way, and yet practical—it probably made a very warm nest. I’m not sure what would be more important to a bird preparing a nest for her young: warmth from toxic cigarette butts or a colder nest made from natural leaves and twigs.
Some of the activities of restoring a woodland ecosystem include planting natural native buffer areas around the woodland, removing invasive species (plant and animal), restricting access to sensitive areas, protecting nesting sites, controlling surface and groundwater flow from nearby homes, and maintaining natural drainage patterns. Believe it or not, a managed fire can be useful, to remove invasive plants and rejuvenate the soil (and it gives the local fire department a bit of extra practice).
On our way back to the village from Mystic Vale, Norman and I walked down the hill and past the historic wooden water tower, which was at one time part of the old Empress jam factory. The tower is quite striking when you see it behind the roadside shrubbery, standing stoically like an old fort or watchtower. The Empress jam “empire” was begun by the pioneer Pease family in the early 1900s. Apparently there was such an abundance of strawberries that the family made jam and canned it in four-pound tins. Their business boomed until an unfortunate mistake led to the demise of the thriving business; they used the wrong kind of sugar for a batch of jam. It was beet sugar, which needed more boiling than regular cane sugar, and the jam fermented in the store and exploded through the tin cans. Well, that’s where the sugar mistake occurred, at the water tower!
The Jam Factory
These days, with all our modern health regulations and inspections of food products, fermented jam would not be sold to the public—it is even regulated at roadside stands. But some food products, such as eggs and fruit and vegetables, are still free from government intervention—roadside stands are the last holdout against government inspection. Governmental regulations are at times so ridiculous that it is laughable—I know a butcher who is bald, and the government health inspector made him wear a hairnet!
We cannot leave Cadboro Bay without mentioning a well-loved tree named Jabba the Hut (after the bloated Star Wars character). Jabba stands on one of the main boulevards. If a tree has character, this bigleaf maple is a true local personality, a really lovable celebrity! The base of the trunk is extremely thick; it has a very symmetrical bulge, yes, a bulge, like a huge internal swelling of some sort. The limbs stretch from this deformity in a natural way and the dear tree looks healthy and is full of leaves which create a great shady canopy. People have their photos taken sitting amongst the spreading branches. The bulging trunk may be due to one of nature’s deformations—it is what’s known as a burl, and it is this bulging deformation that gives the lovely tree such a personality. It is not grotesque in any way, but fascinating, voluptuous, and huggable. It’s as if the tree is saying, “I’m proud to be a plus size!”
If a person had this deformity, we might very well consider it ugly, strange, and perhaps even a little bit frightening (sometimes there is a very fine line between fascinating and frightening, especially for children). However, when a tree has such a deformity, we often see it differently, as an interesting freak of nature, and perhaps with a little more empathy than we would show an unfortunate person. (Frankly, the wonderful bulging tree reminded me of a gross man I saw one time at an “all you can eat buffet” at a resort in Hawaii. But with the tree, it isn’t self-indulgence; it is nature, so it doesn’t repel me.)
Between all these wonderful woodlands, trails, heritage homes, and meadows, there are small pocket parks, lovingly maintained by caring citizens’ groups such as Harry and the Weed Whackers. Along the shoreline of Cadboro Bay, slim yellow kayaks glide and bob in and out of the numerous little sandy coves. Telegraph Bay is where, in 1866, the telegraph cable from the United States arrived (by ship from the San Juan Islands) and Victoria could communicate to the world! The first message received by telegraph to the Victoria office (presumably from the shore) was, “Cable all Okay . . . Take a Drink.”
It’s a little ironic that Cadboro Bay was the site of this great global occasion and yet today, it seems as if it looks at itself from the sea inward, rather than to what lies beyond. This view is much like the way a private eye might view the world, and with that, I tracked down the private investigator whose card I had picked up—she really does crack murder cases!
Burls, Quilts, and Bigleaf Maples
Burls and quilts are deformities that occur in trees, often seen as bulbous protrusions or swellings. Nobody knows for sure, but the causes are most likely stresses, such as pests, fungi, injury, or shock; another cause may be genetic. It was observed that all the maples at a cemetery had burls, but no evidence was conclusive to say that the graves affected those maples in this way; we can only speculate.
A quilted condition is different from a burl in that the deformity consists of large, bubble-like features within the wood. The grain patterns in this wood are exquisite and no two are ever alike. These beautiful patterns can be seen in the bowls, carvings, furniture, and boxes created by wood turners. Musical instruments are often made from trees with the quilted deformity, perhaps because the wood from a quilt contains more air between the fibres. Hardwoods with these unique, swirling and billowing patterns are highly valued and are sold through various companies with informative websites that include some fascinating photographs.
We can imagine nature’s spectacular design inside Jabba’s massive, bulging trunk, but until this grand icon of Cadboro Bay meets his maker, the pattern remains a secret!
The bigleaf maple is a multi-stemmed tree commonly found in the Victoria region, and its trunk and branches are often covered in thick moss. This tree is often referred to as “the paddle tree” because its wood was used by our First Nations to make paddles for their canoes. The leaves were also rubbed on the faces of teenage boys to restrict the growth of thick whiskers. (I wonder if it works on other parts of our body.)
The Life of a P.I.
We agreed to meet at the little used-book store–café in James Bay. I was there first, looking out for anybody who came in wearing a trench coat belted at the waist and a low, dark, fedora-type hat. Nobody fit the bill—my P.I. was a little lady in a brown woolly coat and big yellow scarf—name of Jones, Leanne Jones.
Jones was her married name, which she kept because the O was useful on her business card (the card I discovered in the dark Russian restaurant) as a logo for a magnifying glass.
Yes, P.I. Jones uses a magnifying glass; other items in her tool kit are a flashlight, notepad, camera, tape recorder, thermos of coffee, and binoculars.
P.I. Jones’s special skills are tracing footprints and reading upside down. She knows how to pick a lock but never does anything illegal in her investigations.
Her training was at a religious security school and the courses were based on the Bible.
She investigates murder cases, but is also hired to spy on the movements of suspected spouses.
P.I. Jones says when she gets to a scene, she can “feel” the violence.
Funniest case: She was once asked to follow a bride, every day for a year. “Where is she now?” the new husband would ask every hour. “Going into the washroom at Zellers,” might be P.I. Jones’s answer. When the man knew for sure, after a year had passed, that his new wife was loyal to him, he asked the P.I. out on a date!
Advice to up-and-coming P.I.s: “Learn to observe. Respect your intuition,” which is what I think she has in common with artists.
Painting on Wallace Drive
CHAPTER TEN
The S
aanich Peninsula
and Sidney
Saanich is a First Nations word meaning “land that is good to be.” Other translations are “the fertile land,” “land of clay,” and “this fair land.”
The peninsula has a rich First Nations and agricultural history; when the “white man” bought up the fertile farmlands from the First Nations peoples in the 1800s, many of them established hop farms. Today the peninsula is a neighbourhood of rural properties, large and small farms and wineries, residential pockets, village centres, marinas and beaches, market gardens, roadside stands, and heritage features including historic country churches and pioneer homes.
The many country lanes of the peninsula are lined with hedgerows (which may include the odd old hop!) and the invasive but sweet and succulent blackberries. They are a main attraction for walkers and cyclists to pick and take home to make jam, jellies, and syrups (syrups are basically jams and jellies that wouldn’t set). Mum never used store-bought pectin—she always said that there was natural pectin in the wild apples she picked in the countryside and which are found still today in the hedgerows or at farmers’ markets and the little roadside stands that dot the country roads.
An absolutely delicious treat is a blackberry milkshake—just whip milk, vanilla ice cream, and blackberries in a blender for a very special, local, and wild peninsula late-autumn dessert (top with a mint leaf for adults).
Riders stop to pick wild apples for their horses from ancient, gnarled trees that push through the hedgerows’ tangle of hawthorn and wild Nootka rose. Because of the peninsula’s open green spaces, trail links, hedgerows, beaches, and marine foreshore areas, a vast array of birds and wildlife resides in the country neighbourhood of the Saanich Peninsula.
